Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Wern't player owned customs offices in high and low sec supposed to generate content in empire space? Small groups vying for the POCOs in their home systems so that they could control tax and reign in other local groups taxes?

Trouble is that this isn't really working. As predicted these POCOs are very quickly just falling into the hands of the mega alliances and their alt corps. No small/medium empire space groups can compete for them for fear of being blobbed with 100 of whatever ship.

Suggested fix:
Make the tax NOT take actual isk but a percentage of the imported/exported amount of goods.
E.g. 10% tax doesn't' take an estimated 10% of the isk but 10% of however many units are going in/coming out. And this amount stays in the POCO until the owner corp comes and takes it out.
Also add a capacity to the POCOs and if reaches this capacity then no more tax is taken until it is cleared out.

This makes it so mega alliances who live nowhere near the POCOs have to put people in these systems to remove the goods everyday. This is easy enough for groups which actually live nearby, but makes it less feasible for mega alliances to do it. Sure you could easily have alts in the systems but it still requires more effort, and having pocos in 100 low sec systems with 1000 POCOs quickly becomes unfeasible.

Any suggestions/criticisms welcomed.

Let us try to remember that this is a game, and while this does favor someone that owns a system, it also makes the game incredibly boring.

id rather lose the isk, than my PI goods.
if the POCO's owner is ages away, then dec them and take their POCO.

They can still sell the PI materials for the ISK.

All that changes is that the POCO owner needs to have someone dealing with the POCO products. Those close to a trade hub can just haul them there, those further away might need some industry people running factory planets to reduce the PI volume.

That logistical cost could limit how many POCOs a single corp holds.

It also could simplify things for a multi-character PI chain. Instead of having to fly to a station/POS to transfer the PI materials between characters:
- Set a high tax rate. Maybe even 100%
- One character exports the materials. It all gets taken by the tax.
- The character who is picking up the goods can then take them directly from the tax section.

CCP would probably have to do away with import taxes and only tax exports for this to work. But I imagine that the POCO owners would prefer to take the value in the lower volume exports than the high volume imports, so that shouldn't be an issue.

I rather like this idea - stop PI POCO's being passive income!

Did big corps grab all the highsec customs offices?

Serious question, as I don't visit highsec very often. I did help my alliance grab a bunch near Jita, but that was it. And we didn't even take all of those, we split them with RvB. And they haven't been totally passive, because so many people hate us for some reason or another, so we've had a lot of POCO rep ops.

Which big corps grabbed the rest of highsec POCOs? And why is no one challenging them?

This is laughable, there are literally 10s of thousands of pocos owned by small groups for whom the existing system works just fine. Just because op doesn't feel he can take our pocos, he would rather CCP waste a load of development time making the game boring as opposed to taking pocos somewhere else.

If you owned only 2 systems this would be an insane amount of hauling for what is a tiny amount of income (tax is at best 300k per poco per day atm) Even worse if the abuse suggested in post 10 occurred.
This change would destroy the viability of pocos as an income source entirely (woo 2 million isk per hour of hauling) as no one would ever be interested in owning them except to get free tax for themselves, which is of course what op wants, being too lazy to take his own.



TLDR, op lazy, thousands of available pocos (including whole systems of interbus) pocos make too little for this to be viable


Just because there is a poco you can't take does not mean they are not working as intended, there is a huge amount of conflict over pocos, creating a huge amount of content, this change would completely neuter that.

Thought of this one too, but it is just too easily exploitable and not sure if it is ideal.

For me it boils down to two things:
1. What did CCP intend with player owned empire space customs offices? Passive income for mega alliances? I have a feeling that with the recent introduction of mineral siphons that CCP is quite against passive income. There is little quantitative data available online but a quick look around low sec and you will see that almost every POCO is owned by a very small group of alliances who live far away from them. This distance is reduced with titan bridges into low of course.

2. Do CCP even have the resources to change this in the near future/ Are CCP still focused on POCOs or have they moved on?

I like the idea. POCO'S seem more passive and static than I thought they would be.

They could also introduce a POCO Tax Siphon or something that means the owner has to come along and actively protect his asset. Something to make owning 100 POCO's unmanageable, without destroying the incentive to own 10 (replace 100 and 10 with different numbers as necessary - its the principle that's important)

Exactly.